producers of glass vessels of artistic importance has been held in succession by Byzantine Greeks, by Saracens, by Venetians, by Germans, and for a moment by the English. It is only quite of late, since the commencement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in fact, that any claim for such a position could be made for the French. And yet, in spite of this, the literature of that special subdivision of the _arts du feu_ with which we are here concerned is especially a French one, and this is true not only for the technical and industrial side of the subject, but for the artistic and historical in an even greater degree. I have spoken of the determined way in which these wandering Italians kept themselves apart from the native workmen, so that the secrets of their craft were preserved through more than one generation. In time, however, in France at any rate, not a few of these Italian craftsmen became sedentary, and not the least curious result of the recent researches by French and Belgian _archivistes_ has been to show how certain well-known families of glass-makers from L’Altare settled down in various parts of France, where their representatives may now be found, many of them still engaged in the same work. So that, thanks to these investigations, the Saroldi of L’Altare have been provided with distant cousins in the Sarode family of Poitou; in similar manner the Ferri are represented by the Ferry of Provence, great glass-masters at the present day; the Massari by the Massary of Lorraine; and the Bormioli by the Bormiolles of Normandy and the Nivernais. All these four families were admitted long since to the noblesse of France[167] (Schuermans, _Letter XI._, 1892). It is difficult to form any definite idea of the nature of the craft secrets of these Italians. It can hardly have related to the more obvious materials employed, for as early as 1555 (and it was only about the year 1548 that the great emigration of the Altarists began) the Oriental soda, the _rocchetta_ of Neri, which was brought by Venetian galleys from Alexandria, had in France been already displaced by the Spanish soda or _barilla_, a material that has held its place until recent times. This _barilla_ was made from the famous soda plant, the _Salsola sativa_, which, we are told, was grown from seed in various parts of the province of Murcia, and exported from the adjacent port of Alicante. So again the quartz pebbles from the bed of the Ticino, so highly prized by the early Venetian glass-makers, were early replaced by the pure white sand of Étaples.[168]